


wake

by lieutenanthavoc



Category: Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Genre: (in line with canon/history), Boys Being Boys, Canonical Character Death, Character Analysis, Character Study, Drug Use, Drug-Induced Sex, Hospice, Hospital Sex, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Prostitution, Sexual Content, Survivor Guilt, Vietnam War, and also very depressed, being in the hospital is just a good time to think about how bad things are, joker being a whore, war is traumatic, wasting away in a hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29945229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenanthavoc/pseuds/lieutenanthavoc
Summary: He's a shit head, yes, but even shit heads have feelings sometimes. / Joker, war, and the weight of all that laughing.
Relationships: Cowboy/Joker (Full Metal Jacket), Joker/His Inner Demons
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	wake

**Author's Note:**

> tbh this is probably the most personally important thing i’ve ever written which like yeah... i know it’s full metal jacket fanfiction that’s partially just an excuse to treat joker like a whore & like 3 people MAYBE will read it but. i wrote the majority of it during a really..really hard time and it was beyond cathartic. and i love joker a lot. like A LOT a lot.   
> that said. title and heavy inspiration is from the album Hospice by The Antlers. i started working on this right after reading the book fmj is based on, so some extra story details are pulled from that (and also highly recommend reading it if you’re a fan you can find the pdf free online)! also brought to you by listening to a lot of hospice & sufjan stevens during bipolar psychosis. i said it was cathartic

**wake**

_ well you can come inside, unlock the door, take off your shoes _

_ but this might take all night _

_ but with the door closed, shades drawn, we’re dead enough _

_ they don’t open from outside _

;;

Wake (noun):  a watch or vigil held beside the body of someone who has died

**;;**

  
  


He catches the eye of the boy next to him, the short one, in his peripherals and sees a smirk. It’s a barely noticeable reaction, but it’s a reaction still and that’s all he ever wants. He’s about to be branded the joker now, forever, and what good is a joker without an audience? 

He gets socked in the gut by the drill instructor immediately, but it’s worth it. 

If he’s not gonna be the best, then by god, he’s gonna be memorable.

**;;**

Joker faces the white tiled wall and braces himself.

“You sure?” comes Cowboy’s voice from behind.

“I gotta know,” he answers. Which is true, he thinks. He just wants to know how it feels. It isn’t penance so much as it is curiosity. It’s not atonement so much as it is stupidity.

“Whatever you say, man,” goes Cowboy, disbelief dripping from the words. 

He hears Cowboy breathe in, and then there’s a single dull thud against his back.

“There,” Cowboy says, more confused than inconvenienced, more inconvenienced than annoyed. “You happy?”

“Do it like you mean it,” Joker twists to look back over his shoulder, then smirks. “Like I’m Pyle.”   
The fabric of the towel twists in Cowboy’s hands as they tighten. Joker faces the wall again.

“You’re a fucked up SOB, you know that, right?” Cowboy asks, but the question comes out so  blasé it’s more of an observation than an accusation. Before Joker can retort, the bar of soap in its coarse fabric wrapping comes down on his shoulder blade, hard.

Then again, against the middle of his spine. 

Cowboy hesitates and Joker gives one stunted laugh and huffs, “again.” 

No hesitation now, Cowboy rains down on him again and again and again. The blows land where the curve of his shoulders hunches inward, on his kidneys, around the back of his rib cage. They come until he can’t stand straight anymore and has to hold up a hand signaling stop as he slumps with his forehead against the wall and breathes hard through gritted teeth. 

“Shit, man,” sighs Cowboy, the towel hanging at his side going slack in his hand, stunned. He starts, “I’m sorry--”

Joker cuts him off with a shaking hand that means no, and laughs breathlessly. He turns against the wall so his aching back slides down against the cool tile until he’s sitting on the floor. He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, and bares his teeth in what could be a grin or a grimace. 

Looking up at Cowboy, he says, “feels hardcore.”

The shorter boy crouches down to his level to face him incredulously. 

“Next time,” Joker says, “I’ll get your sister to do it. I bet she’ll hit harder.” 

Cowboy’s face splits from disbelief into a grin as he laughs, “you’re full of shit, man.”

And Joker laughs too and punches Cowboy in the arm, and Cowboy punches back.

**;;**

Leonard Lawrence blows his brains out. 

The ache Joker feels in that moment is not so much remorse as it is pity. It’s not so much pity as it is the way pressing hard on a bruise feels. 

**;;**

  
  


Joker takes the girl up on her offer, outside the Vietnamese cafe, and drags her up to the shithole motel whose entire business these days is grunts passing through for an hour here and there. They’ve got a good price and it’s the one place that’s actually private and at least they change the sheets between each visit, which is all more than can be said about fucking in the barracks. 

The flow of hookers through the soldiers in Da Nang is endless, one girl fondling her own tits after the other, coughing discreetly into the crooks of their elbows while they let the boys decide their price. Sure, Joker will pay five dollars to be loved a long time. This particular brand of love isn’t worth much more than that.

In the shitty motel bed, the hooker is really giving it her all, moaning and declaring her endless love and calling him daddy while he fucks her with half-interest. Her eyes are bored underneath it. She’s overacting the part, and it’s more annoying than it is erotic. 

Joker’s lost interest well before he can even force himself to come so he pulls out and tells her to just leave. She pouts and looks offended, but he really doesn’t care. He flops back on the sweat soaked sheets while she redresses painfully slow, like she’s waiting for him to change his mind. Which he won’t, and he doesn’t.

He slaps five dollars on the nightstand and smokes a cigarette with his eyes closed until she leaves. 

**;;**

Of all the things to really fucking miss from the world, it’s real human connection. Not that Joker can say that any of them are real humans now, or that he’s even had too many of those in the real world anyway. He’s just had some girls he’s fucked around with, and friends who passed the time, and looking back at the world now, from the end of it, that’s pretty fucking sad. 

He’s a shithead, yes, but even shitheads have feelings sometimes. 

So that’s why it means something but also nothing when Cowboy gives him a certain look that they both learned back on Parris Island, when the tops of their matching bald heads are knocking against each other in the corner of the showers while they know they have five minutes until they’re supposed to be done cleaning and they  _ are _ , but Hartman kicks the shit out of them anyway. 

The first time, young and naive and still shaking from the drill instructor’s constant assault, they still have the modesty to face away from each other, elbows clacking together and making a soft slapping sound that almost covers the louder one. Sometimes letting the backs of their buzzed heads brush onto the other’s shoulder, but never turning. Of course, after a few more weeks of pissing in a room filled with other boys just as uncomfortable as they are and a few more weeks holding their dicks while Hartman bellows his rhymes, it doesn’t matter anymore. 

Their shoulders bump into each other from the front and the warmth of another human body against his is a far cry from the cold rifle he hugs at night. 

Only now, it’s less of a frantic rush to rub one out as fast as possible, together but not  _ together  _ together in the showers. No one’s above it in the shit, they all  _ know _ and pretend not to. They know what it means when two guys leave the squad with no words, no explanation, to head off to an abandoned corner hidden from sight. Usually, it's when there’s already a shit ton of dope smoked from the muzzle of a shotgun or a bottle of warm bartered Vietnamese beer in everyone’s hand. 

Crazy Earl’s always the one to pack the bowl, he’s got the perfect notch carved out in his M-14, just small enough to get the job done without fucking his shot. He takes the first hit and says, every time, while passing it, “These are great times we’re living in, boys.”

Joker takes his hit off the gun, holds it in and says, “Man, fuck your great time. I haven’t even had a piece of hand in days.” He blows smoke out and everyone but Mother laughs only because they’re all stoned, not because they haven’t heard this one before. “Makes me miss Cowboy’s sister.”

“Better my sister than my mama,” Cowboy mumbles around a cigarette still looking at the poker cards in his hand intently. 

He folds; Animal Mother wins the hand. 

He looks at Joker and Joker looks back. 

**;;**

They never fuck, not really, because it’s not what they do and it would take too much work anyway. They just get close, too close, to feel each other while they both abuse themselves and eventually can’t take it and reach for the other. 

Joker strokes one hand around both their cocks together and smirks, “tough break for a handjob now, huh?” 

Cowboy bites his other hand, hard. 

**;;**

Animal Mother takes the girl, barely passable for eighteen so small and sharp, hard by the arm and pulls her away first before anyone has a chance to fight back. As if anyone would, they know better than to get in the way. He keeps making a point to look at Joker when he does it, as if to say “fuck you”, as if to say “see?”. As if Joker doesn’t prefer it this way anyway.

Which he does. Which makes him smile. Which is all he does.

The thing is he likes to be last. 

So when the three of them, him and Cowboy and the girl, end up in the back row of the old theater, Joker smokes a cigarette and watches Cowboy take his turn with her with bored interest.

When it’s over, Cowboy zips up and asks for a light while he shoves the glasses hanging from his neck back up the bridge of his nose. Joker gives him one--a light, that is--, and the girl sits primly, legs crossed, in a seat with her jeans folded neatly beside her. 

Cowboy exhales smoke heavily and sighs out, “Happy with my scraps?”

Joker grins that sly tightlipped grin, cocks his head, and says “Well you’re the one who likes to watch me.”

He flicks the butt of a cigarette on the dusty floor and crushes it under the heel of a boot, then gives a short whistle to the girl. “Wanna smoke?” he asks, gesturing with the pack. 

The girl peers at him over her sunglasses, which he loves that she doesn’t even care enough to take off. It's extremely endearing to him and that’s hard to do, to see someone as unbothered as he is. 

She takes one, only a little suspicious. 

**;;**

He huffs into Cowboy’s shoulder and comes hard and--

“I can hack it--I can,” Cowboy sputters, blood gurgling in the back of his throat and dripping out and--

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Joker says after, smirking, “you’re still not quite your sister.” --and

Cowboy dies in his arms spitting blood, it gets on his hands and--

“You know I don’t even have a sister, right?” 

“Yeah,” says Joker, lighting a cigarette. “I know.” 

  
  


**;;**

  
  


He feels the sting of a towel snapping on his back, then the hard thud of soap that follows. It’s not so much a shock as it is a waste. It’s not so much a blow as it is the hollow in his lungs where breath once was. 

It feels the way pressing hard on a bruise feels. 

**;;**

What happens next is he steps on a mine and blows his foot off.

Not clean off, of course, not initially. No, initially, it’s left a mangled knot of gore and tendons and bones that only vaguely resemble where a foot used to be. 

But he’s one of the lucky ones, really. He is.

If the mine had been a well-built, factory-made all American mine, he’d be dead. But instead it was a homemade one, put together with every day scraps and trash rigged to explode. To do damage, yes, but to kill, not so much. He steps down and hears a crunch that just doesn’t sound quite right, and next thing he knows he’s seeing a bright red burst and bits of metal and plastic and white bone shoot out in all angles, and he’s on his back barely conscious with a horrible throbbing in his head. 

He thinks, I’m in a world of shit.

He thinks, I have to deal with this now. 

His ears are ringing.

In a blurry haze, he hears Animal Mother growling, looming over him but sounding like he’s at the end of a long empty hallway, “Joker’s fucking wasted.”

He hears Donlon, above him, over the radio crackling in his hand. “He’s still fucking breathing, man.”

He hears, “then waste him.”

And he expects a gunshot but is met with a needle in the neck and then--

**;;**

“New guy,” Eightball calls, grinning crooked with his head cocked back. He’s looking at Rafter Man and his camera the way a dog looks at meat. “You wanna see something?”

Of course, Rafter Man nods eagerly, as he does, and steps closer to the other man, camera braced in his hand. 

Eightball shifts and slings the blue canvas bag he’s been toting on his back down to his elbow. “I got a collection here.”

Joker looks over Rafter Man’s shoulder as the zipper creaks along it’s teeth and they’re all met with a thick cloud of rotting flesh. Rafter Man gasps at the same time as the camera shutter clicks down and Joker knows the boy hopes no one else heard it over the snap. 

“I cut ‘em off every confirmed kill. Got about eighteen now,” Eightball brags over the click-wind-click-wind beat of the camera. He looks Joker in the eye and says in his slick voice, “You can put this in your story.”

The bag is filled with bloodied, decaying feet. 

**;;**

And then he comes to in a VA hospital, in a haze of beeping and groaning, and a nurse saying, “Sergeant Davis? Can you blink if you can hear me?”

He does blink, but not so much because he can hear her but because his glasses are missing and he’s acutely aware of that and not much else, and that must be the only reason the nurse’s face in front of his is swimming.

“Sergeant Davis,” she repeats, only slightly impatient. 

“Joker,” he grunts back, voice cracked and dry. His tongue can barely twist around his own damn name. 

“Sorry?” She leans in. He can see now that she’s blonde. 

“It’s Joker.” He coughs a few times and then, in what he intends to be The John Wayne Voice but sounds more pathetic than anything, adds, “but you can call me John Wayne.”

The nurse’s eyes narrow over her mask, and the disappointment in her voice is audible. “Oh, so you’re supposed to be funny then?”

**;;**

“Eighteen confirmed kills, or eighteen feet?” Joker says in that way like he always has to get the last word in, like a challenge to see who will be more annoying than he is. 

“ _ Man _ ,” Eightball drawls back, crooked grin splitting across his whole face as he lets the bag drop to the ground with an audible squish no one wants to hear. “What the fuck do you think?”

**;;**

Eventually he does find his glasses, or rather a nurse does because he complains enough about it, they were in an old shoe box along with his banged up camera and the peace button slid under the bed, and can see the shithole they’re passing off as a hospital. The ward is filled with grunts just as pathetic as him, filed in beds so precisely gridded along the walls it reminds him of Parris Island all over again only less fun. 

He’s situated nicely in a far corner, sandwiched between the tall cinder block wall and an unconscious lieutenant. The other man is in a full body cast with only his punched in eyes and puckered asshole chapped lips visible through slits in the gauze, moaning unintelligibly every few moments. His corner position, he notes, at least awards him some semblance of personal space next to the far wall. 

The lieutenant moans again and Joker replies, “I’ll drink to that.”

He lays squished against the bars of his own metal bed frame, barely wider than his body’s wiry frame. Propped against the wall is his bandaged head sunken into a flat, thin pillow. 

Along the middle is his limp body, one cracked rib under an expressionist painting of bruises. At the end, a fresh blunt stump ending just below his right knee. The bandages around it have leaked brown onto the papery sheets.

He thinks, well I’ll fucking be, I’m a whole foot shorter.

He thinks, this fucking sucks.

**;;**

At least Vietnam was interesting.

Here, he’s not so much close to death as he is bored to it.

The worst thing about the VA ward is having so much goddamned time to think.

**;;**

He still sees the bag of feet sometimes, just in his peripherals.

He sees Eightball scooping up the bones and guts of his right foot from the ground while he watches, only Eightball looks the way he did the last time they all saw him, shot full of a sniper’s bullets, while he loads the pulpy mess into his bag. 

Sometimes Cowboy’s eyes look up from between rotting black toes, glassy and too open. Sometimes Eightball picks up Rafter Man’s intestines, spilling from the boy across the tank tracks in the mud. Sometimes Joker does it himself.

Rafter Man shows him a photo he’s taken of his own bloody corpse. 

Sometimes Joker’s the one in the picture. 

Sometimes he takes the picture. 

**;;**

When his sewn up stump is finally done leaking on the sheets and the stitches can be ripped out, they let him out of the ward. Not to leave, but at least out of the open floor. He’s moved to the VA’s so-called extended care unit. It looks like a shitty motel room only less comfortable, with sterile hospital floors and another rickety metal framed bed with space to hang IV bags from. It’s a hospice, really. It’s where the dying are stored while they waste away, just to get it over with. 

They say that’s not what he’s there for though, he’s there because he’s supposed to start learning to walk again and avoid getting a staph infection until he can do that. 

A nurse holds the door open for him which he hates, then places his belongings gently on the bed, which he also hates. He hobbles over the threshold pathetically, still wobbly on the crutches stuffed under his arms. 

“Make yourself at home,” the nurse says as he drops onto the bed gracelessly and hauls his half of a leg up onto the mattress with unease. She closes the door.

If he’d wanted this to be home, he would’ve begged Animal Mother to shoot him. 

**;;**

Joker never planned to come home. Not really.

**;;**

The funniest fucking part of it is that he only has six days and a wake up left when it happens. When he steps on a homemade landmine and blows himself to shit, but maybe shit’s not quite far enough because he was almost out.

What’s funniest about that is that before it happens, he’s thinking of the best way to go out. He doesn’t admit that the best way is probably to step out into one last crossfire on his cockiest one-liner of all, get pumped full of lead, and call it a day. If he really had to say, he’d know that’s his favorite reality, but he doesn’t entirely want to think about it. Just like he doesn’t want to think of the reality where he’s the one to put Cowboy out of his misery while he lays dying but not quite dead in Hue City. Where Cowboy looks him in the eye in his last second with a glare so full of anger that’s gone as soon as it appears. He prefers not to remember, so he doesn’t.

And he doesn’t remember the glorious ending he could’ve had, the one in which he doesn’t lose a foot or survive or have to deal with any part of this shit, because it doesn’t happen.

What does happen is Cowboy dies in his arms and he puts his sweat slicked forehead against the other boy’s clammy one for one last second and that’s the memory he wants to keep. Cowboy dies. Rafter Man dies. He should die, but he doesn’t.

What does happen is he’s the one that has to leave the shit alive. 

**;;**

One of the nurses, an average looking brunette with large breasts in her tight white uniform, sneaks extra morphine in a syringe they share whenever she’s on the one on his night rotation. She locks the door of his prison cell and says, “I got the shit.”

Joker says, “about time,” in a huff then remembers himself and adds with a shit eating grin, “What would I do without you?”

She’s impatient yet still professional when she takes the syringe from her pocket and pulls the tourniquet tight around his arm, like the practiced expert she is. She’s the one with the bad habit, though, he’s just a good excuse for her and he’ll happily take the extra junk he’s not supposed to get. 

There’s a prick of the needle and then it’s nothing but that beautiful feeling, a numbing warmth spreading through his body, making him heavy and sluggish. It dulls the constant ache of his developing phantom limb syndrome and sets his brain to an electronic buzz. 

“That’s good shit,” he sighs, head dropping back against the metal frame headboard with a light clink. 

The nurse is busy flicking the syringe to make sure there’s enough left for her, her eyes lustful, then hiking up her skirt and shooting straight into her inner thigh. 

He watches, mindlessly mesmerized as her lips fall open in relief and knows that she’s feeling even better than he is right because her hands were shaking and she was shiny with sweat when she came through the door. 

It’s like he’s watching from across the room as he knows what comes next. That’s the best part of this, getting a second to exist outside his fucked up body. It feels better than any of the cheap dope the Lusthog squad ever smoked out of Crazy Earl’s rifle, back before Crazy blew himself to shit picking up a stuffed animal from the dirt. 

Even when he’s floating on narcotics in his fucking hospice bed, he kind of wishes he were back in the shit. 

What comes next is the nurse crawls onto him, her eyes glassy and unfocused as she works his dick in her dainty hands until he’s hard and she can ride him in a blurry haze. He barely feels any of it, but that’s because he barely feels anything at all. 

It’s for her benefit anyway, but he’s not complaining. Even if when he really thinks about it, he feels the same as the cheap whores he took turns fucking with the other hungry grunts in barracks and abandoned buildings and sleazy motel rooms, bargained for the lowest price because they’re all high on the power. 

Maybe this is their vindication.

The good thing about morphine is he doesn’t have to think about it.

And even when he does, feeling nothing is better than something.

When it’s over, she thanks him with heavy eyes and asks if he needs one more hit. 

He cocks his head against the headboard and smiles dazed and says, “No, but I’ll take 

five dollars.”

She gives a hollow laugh, and he knows the joke is lost on her. 

**;;**

What good is a joker without an audience?

**;;**

  
  


Then he jerks awake from fitful sleep, from battlefield dreams and the ultimately disappointing homecoming fuck fantasy, and the sniper’s hollow face is on the pillow next to his. Her eyes are open wide, terrified, and so are his. Blood leaks from the hole in the middle of her forehead, the one he gave her, just pouring and pouring out on the pillow and getting on him and--

He knows better as his eyes adjust that it’s just another trick of the mind even while his hands keep shaking. 

That tiny girl, the sniper, she was too young for all of this. 

When it happens, he wishes he had a pound of dope. He wishes the nurse with the breasts and morphine and glassy eyes would come back. He wishes he had a bayonet to hold onto at night to feel safe.

WIth no rifle to hold, instead he curls onto his right side, around the stump where his leg used to be and feels it’s absence.

He’s too young for this too. 

**;;**

To pass time, he breaks a pen open and pours the ink into a bottle cap. Then with the pin on the back of the god forsaken peace button, sticks a peace symbol into his arm. 

When it’s done, he jabs himself a few extra times, without ink, just for good measure.

**;;**

After one of the morphine heady night nurse visits, he sits in the shallow bathtub, still drug warmed and buzzing. Under the water and the dope, his amputated leg looks like an illusion. It looks like a trick of the fluorescent light reflecting on the surface, like when it comes out there will be a whole leg in its right place and this whole thing has just been a really bad trip.

He thinks about drowning himself.

He thinks,  _ would you really want to die here? _

He thinks, that’s fucking depressing. 

So he slides all the way under anyway, head in deep where it’s nothing but warm. In the haze it feels good until it doesn’t feel good anymore because when he opens his eyes under the water, he’s in Hue City. 

He’s got a gun in his hands and it’s his only real friend and the enemy is just out of sight so he has to be better and faster or he will die, he’s hit and he  _ is  _ dying, he’s terrified, he’s terrified, he’s--

His head jerks back out of the water, breaking the surface in a frantic splash, gasping and coughing. His heart races even as he remembers where he is.

He’s in the hospice.

He’s still dying. 

It feels the way being born must feel, fresh from the womb shaking and wet and pathetic and confused. There’s water all over the floor when he claws his way over the edge and collapses on the cold linoleum. He is alive, he is fine. 

He’s fine.

He’s not fine.

He should’ve fucking died out there.

Joker stops joking for one second, finally, and he cries.

**;;**

He never wanted to come home.

Honestly, Joker is just scared to die alone. 

**;;**

They never fuck, him and Cowboy, but they come the closest to it when they fuck a girl at the same time. The girl, as sharp and baby-faced as they come, has already been passed through the squad and they’re the last to go, as always, and they’re gonna watch each other take turns anyway. So they think--fuck it. 

They tell the girl what they want, and she gives them a look but then a discount.

So Cowboy fucks her from behind while Joker fucks her throat, and she’s arching her back, moaning and sucking in between their hard bodies. Joker’s back is to the wall and the girl’s leaning all her body weight into him, and with the way they’re all rocking against the wall together, it feels like Cowboy’s fucking them both. It feels the closest they’ll ever be to fucking. 

It feels close.

He and Cowboy still don’t kiss, not ever, but it’s close enough when they meet hunched over the girl in the middle until their foreheads press together and they pant and groan into the other’s sweat slicked neck, biting at ears and skin like two dogs. 

And that’s what Joker’s thinking of now, the tiny girl huffing between them and Cowboy’s nails clawing on the back of his neck, in a drug daze with the night nurse’s hot mouth bobbing on his cock. Her brown ponytail is tight in his fist. It feels good, but good in the same way her needle’s cold sting feels good. Like a hazy dream, like a means to an end. 

Her eyes are dripping tears that run black with mascara, and she gags quietly and keeps going. He doesn’t feel inside of his body, but does feel her throat and her hands and her soft hair.

He remembers thinking that in the crumbling building, the moonlight on the other boy makes him look beautiful, but he’d never say that outloud. Here in the hospice, with the moon coming through the bars of the tiny window, the nurse looks beautiful too.

Her hand slides down his right leg all the way to the blunt end until her fingers drag lightly over the jagged scar, still swollen and rough in its healing. The sensation is so unfamiliar and jarring and so, so sensitive it sends an electric shock down his spine, turning his stomach, and makes him come instantly. The nurse looks at him surprised, but swallows anyway, then sniffs and wipes her streaming nose on the back of her hand. 

After, she pulls her skirt up higher, grips the bars of the bed frame, then pulls herself over his face and he eats like he’s starving. Her body is heavy and soft, a far cry from the sharp angles of the young, young girls for sale in his memory. The night nurse is a woman, not a girl.

They’ve never done this particular routine, what they’re doing now, and it feels strangely intimate. Not like normal intimacy, or what he imagines that is--he doesn’t even know her name. But intimate in a comforting way, something human, something he hasn’t felt since the last time Cowboy leaned into him and he felt warm. 

So he lets her sit on his face and grips her ass in both hands until she’s shaking and biting down on her palm to stay quiet. He thinks she must be as alone as he is. 

When it’s over, the whole thing, she sits on the edge of the bed and looks at him. It makes him uncomfortable, the eye contact, but he looks back anyway. 

“All the other nurses can’t stand you,” she says calmly, smoothing her hair back where he’s fucked it up. “They think you’re full of shit.”

He folds his arms behind his head and says, “Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

“You shouldn’t.” She looks at him deeper with her glassy stare suddenly clear and says, “I don’t think you deserve that.”

For once, he’s got nothing to say back. He just looks away. 

**;;**

When he looks back up, it’s at figures congregated around him in his hospital bed, glaring down at him with a burning anger in their thousand yard stares. They’re people, dead ones and living ones, ones he knew not all that long ago, but it feels like hundreds of years.

The dead are bitter about being dead; the living are just jaded. 

Leonard Lawrence, Gomer Pyle himself, his face collapsed and pulpy like an old jack-o-lantern that’s been stomped on after halloween, still wearing that stupid permanent smile, asks, “Why did you let this happen, Joker?”

Animal Mother says, “It should’ve been you.”

Rafter Man says, “You should’ve looked out.”

Cowboy spits blood and says, “I never thought you were funny.”

Joker says, “I’m sorry.”

**;;**

Joker realizes he never even knew Cowboy’s name. 

The realest human connection he’s had in years--maybe ever--and he doesn’t even know his real name. He never once thought to ask. Things as human as names never mattered in the shit, not even in death. He thinks he would like to know now, but what difference would a name fucking make. 

Cowboy is dead, Rafter Man is dead, Eightball is dead, Crazy Earl is dead. Leonard Lawrence is dead. They’re all dead and their names are just names, it wouldn’t make a single shred of a difference. His survivor’s guilt is bad enough without dwelling on it. 

And you know what? He does fucking deserve this. 

No matter what anyone says, he deserves this. 

He’s the one that got through this whole thing laughing, he’s the  _ joker _ , and he can be the only one laughing now because he’s the one that survived.

The whole duality of man thing? Sure, it’s a fucking joke. Peace is a joke. War is a joke. Surviving? That’s a joke too. It’s all one goddamn joke. 

He himself is one big joke and now he’s in the hospice with one fucking leg and he’s laughing because there’s nothing else to do. 

It’s not so much self pity as it is pragmatism; it’s not pragmatism so much as it is a bad coping mechanism.

Only he’s not laughing, not really. Not anymore.

He doesn’t actually deserve this, none of them did. They were all just young boys beaten and thrown to the dogs. They were too young for this, and even if they weren’t, if they’d gotten the chance to live as humans first, they wouldn’t have even deserved it then because no one fucking deserved this. 

He never deserved this.

He shouldn’t have to think about it, but he does. 

He doesn’t actually want to be a survivor. A dead marine is a useless marine, but a one-footed one? That’s just a bad joke waiting for a punchline. What do you call a one-footed marine? 

**;;**

The punchline is that Joker doesn’t know what to do now. 

He’s not even sure how long he’s been in the hospital, it all blends together too much, but he’s getting out  _ finally _ , and he doesn’t even know what to do. Home isn’t a real thing. The thought of  _ home _ , what once seemed so concrete sitting around a fire and smoking from the rifle and sharing dreams of what they would all do first when they got home, the food they’d eat and the women they’d fuck--it’s not real.

Home is what lonely boys go to for comfort while they’re sleeping cold on the dirt. 

Home is where he’s supposed to go now.

What he does know is that he can almost walk alone on his clunky new wooden leg. He knows he can leave. He knows he doesn’t want to.

Of course he doesn’t want to stay in the hospice, but he doesn’t know how to be in the world now. He knows he doesn’t have a choice.

**;;**

Cowboy runs a hand over the back of his buzzed head and says, “It ain’t your fault, y’know.”

Joker’s looking at the floor because he can’t seem to look at anything else without seeing Leonard’s face, the bleeding stomped-in pumpkin. When he says it isn’t remorse or pity, he’s lying. He thinks, hey, at least he got to see his first dead bodies back home in the comfort of the world. 

He thinks, small fucking favors. 

He thinks, yes it was. 

It’s all of the above; what it isn’t, though, is repentance. 

“Yeah,” he says back, distracted. There will be more dead bodies to come and they will each be less horrible than this. Eventually, he’ll kill them himself and the guilt he’ll feel will at least be directly his own goddamned fault. And for some reason, that thought makes him smile. He cracks his first real smile since they got to the miserable island, a shiteating, cocky grin, not fully reaching his eyes--a real joker’s smile. He looks at Cowboy, grinning stupid, and says, “The next one will be though.” 

**;;**

Standing unbalanced on two legs, one real and one fake, he leaves the hospital.

Surviving is a daunting thought, but it’s one he’ll have to live with. 

  
  



End file.
